


part by part

by lazywriter7



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, BAMF Nebula (Marvel), Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Canon-Typical Violence, Everybody Lives, Fix-It, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Nebula & Tony Stark Friendship, Nebula (Marvel) Feels, Nebula-centric (Marvel), Rocket Raccoon feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2020-03-20 07:34:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18988144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lazywriter7/pseuds/lazywriter7
Summary: “And you won. Congratulations.”Stark’s ribs are starting to show, ridges of bone pushing against pallid, stretched-out skin. His face is sallow, his fingers trembling. Nebula knows he hasn’t eaten anything for the past sixteen hours. He must be delirious; it’s why he’s saying such things.But he sounds sosure. Like winning is that easy. Achievable. Like it hasn’t been designed for the express purpose of being a remote point on the horizon, to chase after with no peace or rest or end.





	part by part

They test her.

Component by component, before they attach it – _(graft it, screw it onto her body, weapons bolted to a hunk of breathing flesh)_ – test the arm and leg and cranium. Melting point, freezing point, corrosion by acid and plasma, ability to withstand concussive impact. They ponder on the best metals, the best configuration. And then the components become parts of her and are tested again – because you couldn’t have a nervous system shutting down due to massive shocks, due to something as commonplace as pain. What use would that be? What use would she be?

 _You were insufficient before,_ Thanos tells her, and she’s so grateful for his honesty. For his commitment to making her better. _You have to evolve._

But night falls on _Sanctuary II,_ lights dimmed in homage to Titan’s diurnal cycle, and she’s strung up limb to limb and there’s no one. No Korath to sneer at, no Gamora to resent, no Thanos to grit her jaw for and pretend that she’s stronger than the agony. Just a body that has never been hers, and long fingers that trail delicately through the air, pulling her open.

 _You are replaceable,_ the Maw whispers – and in the dead of space, there’s nothing else to hear. She’d have torn out her vocal chords if she’d been allowed to keep screaming. Her heart is deadened under plated ribs and an engineered sternum. _No value except what we choose to bestow._

Night falls on _Sanctuary II,_ and Nebula believes him.

 

~

 

“And you won. Congratulations.”

Stark’s ribs are starting to show, ridges of bone pushing against pallid, stretched-out skin. His face is sallow, his fingers trembling. She knows he hasn’t eaten anything for the past sixteen hours. He must be delirious; it’s why he’s saying such things.

But he sounds so _sure._ Like winning is that easy. Achievable. Like it hasn’t been designed for the express purpose of being a remote point on the horizon, to chase after with no peace or rest or end.

They’re shaking hands now. “Fair game. Good sport.”

 _Maybe it’s reachable if the rules are designed different._ It’s a traitorous thought – her mind wants to flinch away from it, even now. There are other thoughts to console her – if he’d been in a better state, not half an inch away from starvation, she’d never have been able to beat him.

But he doesn’t look beaten. Stark looks calm, and has a warmth in his eye that is the most alien thing about him.

“You had fun?”

“I had fun.” She rasps – and the world tilts on its axis, and the world stays the same. Because she can’t go back, now. She’s accepted the victory, and it sweeps over her, baffling and wondrous. It’s nothing she remembers feeling, and yet she’s the same person she’s always been.

“Here.” Stark maybe says, and food is being pushed into her hands, _and_ _Mother smiles. Her silver hair has gone ragged and grimy-yellow, the sleeves of her tunic hanging loose on knobby wrists. They’re hunched under an awning together, water splashing around their ankles where the Close has been waterlogged for over two weeks now, same as all the narrow alleys in Sector V. But she’s holding a mallowfruit in her palms, slightly squashed at one end but still bright and purple, and Nebula rips it from her hand even though her own fingers don’t completely fit around it._

_“Leave some for Aramis.” Mother cautions, but she’s smiling at Nebula’s grubby face and sticky chin, running grimy fingernails through her spiky locks of hair. “You know he hates it when you don’t share.”_

Sweet on the outside, with a juice tangy enough to burn the back of your tongue. She hasn’t tasted a mallowfruit in decades. Stark would probably like it.

He doesn’t look surprised when she nudges the food back. It feels like a bigger revelation than winning.

 

~

 

Thanos believes that true gratitude is only possible when you know from where you came. From where you’d risen. It’s why he leaves her all the memories.

Pink skies over the city of Luphom, vivid and brilliant, like the colour of a Krylorian’s skin – tinting to a peach-like hue closer to the horizon. Hilly terrain, sloping streets, air sticky-hot as dawn ripened to dusk, humidity bursting to torrential rain when the night came. Every night without fail – it’s what she’d been named for. The constellations and nebulae that Luphom never got to see, a distant dream.

The rain fills up the streets, drains too narrow to flush out the sheer volume – and they all find their vantage points, the water-climbers. Up on a metal dumpster with a part of its lid still intact, the roofs of speeders long deserted in closed-down garages, in low-hanging balconies whose owners would never come out in the spitting rain. They’re water-climbers because they can’t be anything else, squatting in wet season on the streets.

Aramis can climb with the best of them. They are a laughing, frolicking pack – holey shoes and flyaway hair, not a full set of teeth between them. They find footholds in nothing, sail paper boats down the flooded road, splash and tumble and pull each other up; and Nebula shivers in her little awning, water licking at her thighs, mouth pursed stiff and envious eyes.

He always comes back though. He comes back when the rain stops and dawn is a fine film of mist away; slips a coin into her ragged pocket, and rests his head on her bony shoulder. She stays still until he starts snoring, and then winds her fingers through the fluff of his hair.

Aramis is eight, when the _Sanctuary II_ warship blots out the pink skies of Luphom. Nebula is ten.            

Heavy boots splash through the streets, dogged by the sound of snapping mongrels. Blasters. Crying. They’re all nimble, all hardened by what fate has chosen to dole out to them throughout their lives. No one escapes.

Except Nebula, you see – because she is separate from the pack. Separate from the masses huddling together, thin shoulders and pale faces, flinching back from the drooling maws of the mongrels. Shepherded together, knee-deep in water that tranquilly reflects the skies – pink that is steadily darkening as blood seeps into the streets.

She is separate and Thanos takes it to be a mark of strength. Takes her, and it isn’t until they’re halfway up the ramp to the warship that she scrapes together the courage to look back. Peers over the massive arm steering her trembling shoulders, sees the herds in the water. They’re too far now for her to make out any faces.

She searches anyway. Sight leaping from blurry face to blurry face – _there_ , that glint of light off a pale head, that could be Mother–

The arm around her pushes. Nebula snaps her head away reflexively, immediately. She walks. Step after tiny step, till the water level recedes from her ankles; a last, clutching grasp before ebbing away entirely.

She remembers the feeling for years after. The touch of water retreating from her feet as she finally climbs high enough, and the sick pit of self-loathing in her belly.

 

~

 

The _Benatar_ is unsettlingly quiet. It is an M-class spaceship, with only the two of them to putter around, but the raccoon has never struck her as the silent type.

He’s silent now, as they fly out of the Hiberlac system – all the planets in the vicinity have been hit hard by power and supply shortages in the aftermath of the Snap. They dropped off a shipment, and took off straight after by unspoken agreement; neither were comfortable with the all too palpable gratitude in the eyes of the people. It isn’t like they were up to helping with any of the real needs here – leadership, shoring up a crumbling social system, dealing with a population reeling with uncertainty, no idea of the true causes behind what had happened.

They’re in the cockpit now. The racco– Rocket, has been fiddling with the nav panel for the past hour, screwdriver held between his sharp teeth. He put it in there half an hour ago, after one too many times of opening his mouth as if to speak to a spectre, before clacking his jaw shut. He reminds her a bit of Stark in that way – the same strained, uneasy quiet while working, like they were too used to babbling at someone that was no longer there.

(After the glowing woman in Kree gear had brought the ship down to Terra, Stark had offered Nebula a roof for as long as she wished, even though he’d just been reunited with his wife – she’d considered it for a second, before remembering Rocket’s diminutive figure silhouetted against the massive, empty entryway to the _Benatar._ It hadn’t really been a choice, in the end.)

Rocket screws open a corner of the panel, before screwing it down closed again – he isn’t really paying attention to what his paws are doing. His eyes, beady-black and reflecting the shine of the plasma lights, are staring fixedly at a point on the floor. There seem to be a few grains of something brownish, maybe soil, flattened against the grey flooring.

He reaches out in increments, brushes against it gently with his toe.

“Do you want to play paper football?”

“Wha…?” Rocket blinks, head swivelling in Nebula’s direction.

Nebula presses her lips together, awkwardness twisting up her tongue. She can’t say it again. “Nothing. It’s just a stupid game.”

Rocket doesn’t say anything for a while, before – “Can’t be any stupider than Arcade Defender.”

She ponders that for a second. “What’s an arcade?”

“Hell if I know.” Rocket absently sets his screwdriver down, where it rolls away from him unhindered. “Quill had the game on him when he first left Terra. We couldn’t get Groot to stop playing it…. stupid handheld thing… you could only go left and right, and shoot at bits of light falling from the top. How dumb is that?”

“Very dumb.” Nebula says.

“Quill wouldn’t admit it, but he hated it when Groot started beating all his high scores. Insect chick just stood over Groot’s shoulder and watched like it was the most amazing thing she’d ever seen.” Rocket’s whiskers fluff up a little, like a quiver of amusement. His eyes are glassy. “Drax only tried it once, and got game over in thirty seconds. Said, _this machine has thwarted me_ , and never played again.”

Rocket’s small shoulders curl inwards, bent even smaller. “They were all so, so stupid.”

Nebula’s eyes flick over the metal ports embedded in his back, draggled fur and skin red and scarred-looking around them. It prods at the ache in her own mechanised joints. “Once… when we were younger, Gamora had just been rewarded for making her first kill. She came to find me, to share her winnings. We were both punished when this was discovered.”

 _That’s… not a funny story, just so you know._ Stark’s imagined voice echoes in her head, a warm reproach.

But Rocket barks out a laugh, claws tapping heedlessly on the nav panel, “Yeah. She was pretty stupid too.”

Silence relapses in the cockpit again, six empty chairs and both of them squatting on the floor. A detached part of her mind wonders if Quill left his music-machine down here somewhere.

“It’s.” Rocket begins abruptly, words escaping half-bitten. “It’s better. Having someone around who also knew them.”

It’s like a glitch in her brain, trying to connect _better_ with herself. Her entire life has been about eking out achievements, desperately clawing for better – how did she get it the time she isn’t even trying?

“You too.” The words escape her tongue on reflex, and Rocket nods as if he understands, even though she doesn’t.

 _Gamora would be proud._ Strangely enough, it’s her brain forming the thought – not Rocket, or some remembered echo of Stark. The words don’t ring hollow, or false.

 _She would_ , Nebula repeats to herself. _And I would totally beat her at paper football._

 

~

 

Coming face-to-face with herself is like cracking open that old pit in her stomach – loathing bubbling out uncontrollably.

Or at least, only for the first few seconds. It spikes and fades, and Nebula is left studying her own mirror-image, wondering what the others see when they look at the past version of her.

Cruelty. Slavishness to a despicable cause. All things worth loathing.

Yet, it’s remarkably difficult to hate something when it looks this desperate. This terrified. Maybe it’s why Gamora ( _herealiveherehere_ ) tries to reason with the past version of her, even if Nebula knows for a fact it won’t work.

This version of her hasn’t spent three weeks drifting in space with a frail Terran man brave enough to go against Thanos. Hasn’t said ‘ _I wasn’t always this way_ ’, only to hear back _‘neither was I_.’ Doesn’t know a basic, solid truth –

 _It won’t stop hurting._ Nebula watches her own face and feels the loathing seep away. Feels nothing. _You think it will, but it won’t. He won’t stop hurting you if he likes you. He said he loved Gamora, and he came back with the Stone, and Gamora never came back at all._

This version of her lies on the ground, after Nebula presses the trigger. It doesn’t feel like an act of hate.

 

~

 

When she steps out on the battlefield, the _Sanctuary II_ is looming in the skies.

For a second, she’s frozen in time. Chin lifted, heart frantic in her chest, watching a too-familiar nightmare. Except then the chaos around her filters in – the yells, the clash of steel, the sparks of magic and lightning and mongrels getting mowed down where they stand.

This isn’t a massacre. This isn’t an array of the defenceless, whose existence was deemed too burdensome to be allowed to continue. This… they’re fighting back.

The air is thick with dust, and Nebula breathes in it all. Her batons sizzle by her sides, electricity arcing up and down her arms.

She hacks and slashes her way through – plunges a baton into the gut of a mongrel and rips it right back out. One leaps onto her back and bites at the steel of her shoulder; she catches it by the head, and snaps the neck clean.

She’s brought down to the ground in the very next instance; a giant blade lodging itself in her knee, attached to a long, black handle – ah, Corvus Glaive. She’d always found the Black Order particularly repellent.

She turns on her back while she’s on the ground, rams a baton right into Corvus’ filthy maw. He howls with the pain, and she takes the few seconds to wrench his scythe out of her knee and swing straight for his head. It separates clean, and rolls to a stop next to her side – Nebula grits her teeth, spits out blood, and yanks her kneecap back in place. Pushes herself up; the pain is secondary. And she has yet to get to the figure in the centre of the field, towering over everyone else.

_“You should have killed me.”_

_“Would have been a waste of parts.”_

By the time she slaughters her way to the epicentre of the battle, Captain America and Thor are already down. Thanos is a hulking figure with his back to her, tall enough to eclipse almost everything else. He’s facing Stark, who’s half-braced on the ground, face bloody and ashen and etched with lines of desperation.

 _Not him._ Nebula holds her batons at the ready, metal crackling viciously at her fingertips. Rage swirls through her head, a building blaze. _Not him not him not him nothimnothimnothi_ –

Even across the distance, she can see Stark’s eyes flicker over to her, perhaps caught by the arcing electricity. His hand is half-raised, red-and-gold knuckles glowing with five blinding points of light.

Her fingers slacken, and the batons drop to the ground, sizzling against the soil. She stretches out a hand, unaware of what her face might be saying. _Do you believe I can do this?_

Stark’s face twists for a second, visible conflict and agony. Then his jaw straightens, firms up in resolve, eyes clear and trusting – and reaches his hand out toward her.

Thanos lunges forward, all-too-clearly realising his mistake, but it’s a second too late. The gauntlet streams through the air, broken down into its component parts – the wrist cuff slamming into her cybernetic hand, metal on metal, the interlocking plates following shortly behind. The Stones are six glowing points of heat on her unyielding skin, and she waits for them to slide in place before closing her eyes and breathing out.

_Snap._

The pain. The pain is–

Nothing. Her arm begins to liquefy, gauntlet charring and dropping to her heels, elbow sloughing off after it. It’s nothing she hasn’t felt before, nothing that registers beyond the cold, furious triumph ringing in her head.

Her shoulder moults to a stump, and Nebula pushes herself up to her feet.

She looks down at the slurry on the ground. This is who she is. This is how she was made. An amalgamation of replaceable parts, each one discarded to make way for something better. This is the body she has, and it _belongs_ to her.

At the corner of her vision, she can glimpse Stark’s face – bright eyes and lined with a savage sort of pride. There’s a ember of gratitude beginning to light in her chest, but there’ll be enough time for that later.

Nebula walks. She walks till she’s facing Thanos on his knees, and goes up even closer. Takes in every detail of the man – the dark eyes, the stolid chin, the lips so often flattened in dispassion but now trembling with pain.

 _Look at me._ I _did it. I did what you spent your entire life chasing, what nearly killed you, and it couldn’t even keep me down for a minute._

She doesn’t say any of it. Reaches out with her remaining hand instead, runs two fingers over where his brow is beginning to disintegrate.

“You never loved her.” She strokes down his cheek, like he used to with all of his children. His soldiers. And she smiles. “I won.”

Thanos crumples to dust at her feet.

 

~

 

It’s been pouring for the past hour.

Water plinks off the drainage pipes set into the roof, patters on the wet soil and rush-green leaves, hits the surface of the lake to set off a thousand ripples. The wind is angled enough to soak the back porch too, but Nebula is disinclined to move.

The floor is cold under her thighs, the wall colder against her back. She folds her legs in tighter, feels the spray of the rain on her shins. The world smells freshly washed. There are puddles forming beyond the porch, little pools of grey that ripple continually as the drops continue to fall.

She hears bare feet padding across the floor – her ears prick, but there’s no tell-tale sound of slipping heels or a yelp. She looks straight ahead, breathes out and waits.

Morgan comes and sits beside her, legs folding one over the other in imitation, till her bony knee pokes against Nebula’s thigh. Nebula doesn’t twitch.

A minute elapses, maybe more. Morgan fidgets with the hem of her t-shirt. “Do you like the rain?”

Nebula turns her head, regards the small face looking up at her. “I do.”

“I like the rain too.” Morgan scooches up closer to her, till they’re almost hip-to-hip – Nebula extends an arm on automatic, so the cold of the wall doesn’t filter through the thin material of that t-shirt. Morgan presses her back to the arm, small torso warm against Nebula’s side.

“Do you know how to make paper boats?” Nebula asks.

Morgan shakes her head.

“I’ll show you.” A brief pause, then Morgan presses her cheek to Nebula’s side. She’s said she likes the smoothness of the metal.

Nebula settles her hand on the back of her dark head. Winds her fingers gently through the hair, and watches the rain fall.

**Author's Note:**

> According to the wiki, Nebula does come from a planet called Luphom, but all other details of her past have been invented for the purpose of this story. Also, this is not meant to reflect on any way the movie should/could have gone, so any thoughts about how this wouldn't have been possible/respecting Tony's ending, will be unnecessary ;) 
> 
> Comments and kudos welcome <3


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